Pages

Thursday, 31 May 2012

Data
Warehouses were driven by the explosion of data within corporate ERP and CRM
systems and the need for better management reports. Generally speaking, the
standard reports from these packaged systems did not fit the needs of most
corporate so initially there was a huge demand to download data to Excel or
Access. This approach spawned a huge industry out of end user computing with
the report development process in the hands of power users within each business
group. While at the time it certainly added value, if left unchecked it created
huge internal disconnects for management reporting processes. The advent of
better replication and BI tools helped corral some of the wild west attitude
that prevailed, while in parallel the management reporting processes,
integrated ERP/CRM user friendly reports improved but most importantly, the
deployment of Data Warehouses aimed at delivering really useful end user
reporting started to gain traction.

If you were
not around to see the buzz and hype that surrounded the planning and deployment
of Data Warehouses then you might think this all happened really quickly and
industry got real value from most deployments. The real truth is that most Data
Warehouse deployments in the early years struggled to gain traction due to
several factors and for the first 10 years there were many costly failures.

The data
stored in Data Warehouses is primarily extracted from the ERP and CRM systems
so thus comes from known sources that are updated at regular intervals and
where the ERD is under tight control. Big Data deployments typically have
several new data sources that are coming from outside the control of the
corporate IT group. The data structures, data provenance, data quality, timing
of updates and several other factors are not within the control of the
consumers in most cases. These data sources can provide data in several formats
which include even unstructured data.

If we are
to believe in the vision that “data is the new oil” for service enabled
businesses of the future, then businesses must develop staff, technology and
processes that will assist in unlocking the value beneath the surface. The
challenge is a very different one to deploying Data Warehouses so the staff and
approach need to be adjusted. The future vision of business and government
functions powered by Big Data enabled services disrupts the existing paradigms
of static processes that are occasionally reviewed and changed. The new world business
order will have even more nimble business processes where we understand not
just what happened so we can report on that historical event or what even might
be a feasible scenario that could play out but we will better understand the
factors influencing these events so we can do further models and react closer
to real time. The organisational ability to react to change will be key, organisations
that are better informed with nimble processes will be better positioned to
react to downturns or take advantage of upturns as the opportunities arise.This is where the FuturICT Flagship www.futurict.eu hopes to play an important role in the development of this new Big Science.

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Over the next several weeks I will publish a series of
articles on the FuturICT blog on what FuturICT means for the future of Data
Business. Yes I am explicitly using the term Data Business as that is the
portion of the project I am closely related to and these two words highlight
the potential impact of the project for our business partners as well as broad
segments of society.

From the beginning we have always said the project is about
connecting Science with Policy with Technology. The planned synthesis of these
three items is not as easy as it seems so the FuturICT goal is a real “Grand
Challenge”. Within the project there is a focus on leveraging ICT, Social
Science and Complexity Science in order to deliver the goals of FuturICT. I
like to use the slogan “Big Society, Big Problems, Big Data, Big Complexity so
hence we need this new multidisciplinary approach from Big Science to help us”.

In order to understand the broad ranging concepts that are
involved in FuturICT I intend to elaborate on the topics below in separate
posts. Hopefully they will give you some context as to what are the most
important components of the projects and how they relate to business and the
jobs, growth and increased competitiveness agenda that is so badly required in
the EU.

·The journey from Data Warehouses to Big Data

·Planetary Nervous System (PNS)

·Living Earth Simulator (LES)

·Global Participatory Platform (GPP)

·Innovation Accelerator (IA)

·The Service Economy, Knowledge Economy,
Innovation Economy,....

·Business Engagement and Business Impact

·Building a scientific community as the first
step to starting a movement that will revolutionise how we use data

Since the origin of human civilization, there
is a continuous struggle between chaos and order. While
chaos may stimulate creativity and
innovation, order is needed to coordinate
human action to create synergy effects, more efficiency, and common goods
such as our transportation infrastructures, universities, schools, and
theaters, institutions (like parliaments and courts), but also language and
culture.

According
to Hobbes, civilization started with everyone fighting against everybody else
(“homo hominis lupus”). Even today, civilization
is highly vulnerable, as the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia has
shown, but also the situation in many countries today, particularly after
natural disasters.

On the
one hand, we are struggling with
conflicts, which are the result of suppression and lack of participation,
and of sanctioning people who are not part of the mainstream culture. On the
other hand, we are suffering of many
social dilemmas, such as the exploitation and destruction of our
environment, global warming, overfishing, tax evasion, exploitation of social
benefit systems, and other tragedies of the commons.

In order
to mitigate problems like these, we need
to learn how to understand and manage complexity in our
techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. For this, we need to think out of the box, because complex
systems work differently from what our intuition suggests.

Complex systems are often hard to predict and hard
to manage. And they behave in surprising ways. Their
behavior is NOT well understood from the properties of their COMPONENTS. It’s
rather the INTERACTIONS between these components, which we need to focus on,
because they are the basis of the self-organization
of complex systems and of new, so-called emergent
properties, which cannot be understood from the component properties. Society is more than the sum of its parts.

The change of perspective from a
component-oriented to an interaction-oriented view may be AS hard and
revolutionary as the transition from the
geo-centric to the helio-centric worldview, which made modern physics
possible, and many of the benefits that came with it. This new systemic view
will enable us to find new solutions to old problems such as social conflicts
and tragedies of the commons.

Let me
stress that economic value generation
would not be possible without many kinds of social capital, such as trust, solidarity, social values, norms,
and culture. While absolutely crucial for social well-being and the functioning
of society, social capital is largely
invisible, and hardly understood. We know, however, that it is the result of our social network interactions.
But social capital may be damaged or
exploited, as the environment has been damaged and exploited. Hence, we need to learn how to value and protect
social capital. The evaporation of trust during the financial crisis may
serve as a warning example. It caused the evaporation of thousands of billions
of dollars in the stock markets and elsewhere.

In order
to learn how to protect social capital, we need, first of all, a global systems science, which allows us
to gain a holistic understanding of
our world, of systemic risks, and how integrated systems design can create more
resilient and sustainable systems. Changing
interactions in the system can mitigate problems, since the current kinds
of interactions are causing them. In fact, unstable interactions cause problems
such as tragedies of the commons, segregation, conflict, revolutions, wars, and
cascading effects causing extreme events and disasters. Moreover, our global markets are constructed in a way
that ethical behavior tends to have a
competitive disadvantage – that’s why ethical behavior has so hard times to
survive and spread.

We may
understand such systemic instabilities
as situations, in which a situation gets out of control even, if everyone is
trying to do his/her best. Take dense, but continuous traffic flow on a circular road as an example. Sooner or later, the
traffic flow will break down, creating a traffic jam, although everyone tries
to avoid it. In other words, systemic
instabilities makes systems largely uncontrollable. But to some extent, this
can be changed!

Societies have found many ways to create social
order. The most archaic one is the creation of
families and tribes, which builds on the mechanism of genetic inheritance.
Neighborhood interactions (even with strangers) and direct reciprocity based on
repeated interactions (I help you and you help me) is a more modern mechanism
to promote social cooperation. Furthermore, humans have created sanctioning
institutions (including the police). And last but not least, cooperation and
social order may be promoted by reputation mechanisms. To counteract global
destabilization, we are currently seeing a growth in sanctioning efforts, but
reputations systems are also quickly spreading, e.g. in the internet.

To stabilize our ever more complex systems, we
will have to integrate decentralized management elements into our management
approaches, utilizing the principle of self-organization.
New information and communication technologies make it possible to overcome
barriers to social, economic and political participation. They could also
support fair ways of sharing. Again, the interaction rules are crucial here. If
someone who cuts a cake can take the first piece, it will often be the biggest
one. If the person, who cuts the cake takes the last piece, he/she will be very
careful to cut it in a fair way, with all pieces having an equal size.

New information and communication technologies can
also promote an inter-cultural understanding (via an
intercultural translator), facilitate social money (with a memory and
reputation), or value-sensitive action. They can furthermore promote
accountability and awareness.

Awareness helps
to avoid many mistakes one would otherwise make. The FuturICT project plans to
create a Planetary Nervous System, which will support such awareness of the
state of the world, including the value of social capital. FuturICT’s Living
Earth Simulator will help to anticipate possible scenarios (as we have done it
by mental simulation in the past for much simpler situations). This can warn us of systemic risks, but also
point us to new opportunities. And finally, FuturICT’s Global Participatory
Platform will make these new instruments, which serve to gain insights into our
complex world, accessible to everyone.

Remember,
most people DO want to appear attractive
and beautiful. If we manage to create awareness of the implications of
their decisions and actions, they will change their behavior. I am deeply
convinced that we CAN create a better world – if we create suitable
instruments, gain better insights, and do it together.

FuturICT Hubs

Followers

FET Flagship Initiative

The activities leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284709 - project 'FuturICT', a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area